I was planning on posting a nice informative post for my first post on this blog, but I woke up feeling sick, sick, sick, so I’m just going to get right to the thick of it. (what does that even mean?)

I’m Liz.

I like to cook.

I like to make things too. Mostly out of yarn. It’s taken over our closet. I’ll spend an hour or so organizing, sorting, and bagging all the yarn and accessories and then I’ll get that itch. The itch to make something. Mostly, I blame that on Pinterest. There’s just way too much cute stuff on there! And then there’s yarn all over the closet floor again. Oh well.

I’m married to the love of my life, Bill. We have two wonderful kids together! One of them is going to be four next month! The other one will be one in December.

I think this blog will mainly be about the stuff I make and like, because hey, I’m the one writing it! *singing* It’s my prerogative! Sorry, I’ll try not to burst into song too frequently.

I’ve really been into canning things lately! Who knew it could be so fun?! A lot of people, apparently! There’s tons of information out there on how to can almost everything! There’s lots on how NOT to can things, too, so if you’re going to try it, be sure to read up on all the safety tips!

So far, I’ve made peach jam (heavenly!), jalapeno jelly (if you haven’t tried it, it’s a must!), Mt Dew jelly (Wait…where are you going? I’m serious! It’s a lot better than you’d think and it comes out a beautiful bright yellow! It’s basically just lemon lime jelly. Anyway, if you have a Mt Dew lover in your life like I do, it’s SUPER easy and fast and it’s really good!), and I tried my hand again at pickled jalapenos! I tried one recipe about a month ago and they came out sweet. Blech. We just don’t do sweet pickled stuff here. There seem to be a TON more recipes out there for sweet pickles/jalapenos/veggies than the salty/sour variety, but I did a LOT of looking and think I came up with a recipe that might replace the jarred ones that we’ve been buying from the store. They’ll be ready to try in 9 more days (10 total), so I’ll be sure to post about those if they turn out well! I’ll be sure to tag it with tons of tags like “not sweet pickled jalapenos” and “non sweet pickled jalapenos” because that’s what I googled and came up with NOTHING! I can’t be the only one out there looking for a recipe like the pickled jalapenos you buy in the store.

It’s super gloomy out now and our indoor lighting really sucks, so I’ll wait to take some pictures of my jams and jellies, but I WILL post them soon! I think I may have a picture of the jalapeno jelly on Instagram…

Wow…talk about blurry…never mind on that picture!

I’ll definitely try and take some better ones today.

I also made apple butter last year that turned out spectacularly!!! I’m planning on making a bunch of that again possibly later this month. I’ve got quite the wish list of recipes going over here! Later this week I’m going to attempt marinara sauce and tomato paste and possibly salsa! My hubby LOVES my homemade salsa but Man! I can’t get near him for the rest of the day after he’s eaten it! Bill says it gives him “Dragon breath”! HAHA! He says it’s worth it though, but I’m not sure. I’m totally anti cilantro and he loves it, so he definitely has dibs on the salsa.

After publishing this post a few days ago, my mind was not finished coming up with things to complain about, apparently. Well, I’m pregnant. 34 weeks pregnant now. So blah. It’s my belly and I’ll cry if I want to. (I’m sure that song will be stuck in my head all day now. Thanks, self.)

I see I’m not wasting any time getting to the whiny portion of our programming.

Would you like some cheese with that whine? Why yes, yes I would. And some pepperoni while you’re at it. Chop chop.

MOAR COMPLAINING!

1.) My husband has gone back to school and while I’m very, very proud of him, I never see him anymore and when I do, he’s all preoccupied with school. Also, all MY parents want to talk about now is his school work and how things are going with him, blah blah blah. And I totally feel like the invisible pregnant woman over here. I’m trying to be the good wife and not wave my arms around yelling WHAT ABOUT MEEEE??? AND THE BAAAABEEEEEEYYYYYY! But man, I’m getting close.

2.) As I mentioned above, I am now 34 weeks along! Which means, less than 6 weeks! I am getting more and more impatient by the second. I’m done. SO DONE. I found out I was pregnant at 3 weeks along. I feel like I have been pregnant for about half of my life. If things are this uncomfortable now, I can’t imagine how they’re going to be a month from now! Yikes!

3.) Look! Not complaining in this one! We finally got a car seat! Yay! I have been obsessing about this for months now. Such a huge weight feels like it has been lifted off of me (at least off my mind, cause who are we kidding? Weight is not doing any leaving around here!). It’s all I can do not to go ahead and put it in the car. I’ve already decided to try it in the stroller later today once the Hubs goes off to work. (I’m going into Stealth Nesting Mode! HA!). We also got this bottle/accessory draining rack that looks like a little patch of grass, which I am totally in love with. I want to drain our dishes on it. It is so freakin’ cute! Last time, I had one of the Munchkin bottle racks and I ended up hating it. And then I hated it three times as much when we had to get two more just to keep up with all the bottles and stuff that goes along with them and they took up ALL of my counter space and the “kick stand stick things” that hold the bottles kept falling down and GAH! JUST GAH!

4.) I can’t believe I didn’t mention this in the last post, but I decided that I had too much skin on my hands and knee and thought it would be a fabulous idea to fall down the front steps into the driveway. Yeah, not really. But for the last two weeks, I’ve had a horrible case of road rash on my hands and one of my knees, but it’s FINALLY healing all up and I don’t cry every time I hit my hand on the corner of something, which was ALL. THE. TIME. Pregnant = Clumsy!!! And when you’re already pretty damn clumsy, that just can’t be good.

5.) Also busted my ass on the kitchen floor a few days later.

Hopefully that’s all for Whinestock 2012 (unless I fall down again, which, in that case, there will probably be more whining).

Here’s something non-whiny!

Also, my cactus is doing this:

I’m guessing it wants to remind everyone that it’s National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Or it just wanted boobs. I’m not really sure which.

I didn’t bother brushing the excess flour off the tops before taking the picture (probably because they were still about 9000 degrees) but still!! Bread! I have made it! The kind you can get from any store! Except these 3 smallish loaves took me 4 hours instead of 10 minutes to run into the grocery store. But hey, I got free air freshener out of it! My house smells wonderful!!!!!. The delicious smell alone is worth the work!

Maybe this time I did forget about you…just a little bit. Things have been busy over here! Here’s a list of all the things that have been keeping me from you:

1.) I’m 33 weeks and 4 days along which means only 6 weeks and 3 days left (hopefully! Have I mentioned that my son was 9 DAYS LATE?! 9 DAYS OMG!). I now look like I swallowed a basketball (although the pregnancy app thing says “pineapple”, which ouch!) and can see her move around constantly and she gets the hiccups a lot! I think that may be part of the whole “pregnancy brain” thing. You’re trying to do something because there’s SO much to do ALL THE TIME and you have a list a mile long in your head and suddenly…thump thump squiiiiiirrrrrm….omg the baby’s trying to kick her way out of my belly button! Wait…what was I doing? So there’s that.

2.) My son turned 3! WHAT?! I think I’m still in shock. I can’t believe he’s 3! On the one hand, it seems like only yesterday (blah blah blah), but then…I can’t really seem to remember our lives without him! The last 2 birthdays, we’ve had a party for him, but this time we decided to just do a small family thing, which was nice! It still seemed like a lot of work though! (but doesn’t everything these days?!)

3.) Did I mention that I’m 33 weeks???

4.) Nesting, nesting, nesting… I’m not sure how many times one can organize a closet full of teeny tiny clothes, but I’m pretty sure I’m closing in on the record.

5.) My sister had a baby boy! And since I have had a baby boy and am currently gestating a baby GIRL, there is a ton of baby boy stuff that just simply will not make that transition to baby girl…so that means WEEEEEEEE!!! I get to go through all our old baby stuff AGAIN!!! YIPPEE! So naturally I’ve got a crap-ton of stuff to send her, that is currently sitting in a box on the pool table because I got distracted again. Probably by a cookie or muffin or something.

**I apologize in advance for the scattered pregnancy-brained post! At 5 months along, I’m afraid the crazy hormones have caught up with me!**

I have not forgotten about my blog! Or the Internet (just ask facebook)! I have just been very busy being pregnant and walking into rooms and forgetting why!

And while all this is quite annoying (Husband at 7 pm “What’s for dinner?”…Me “Uhhhhh….”) it has come with at least one perk.

Cravings!

As with my first pregnancy, I didn’t crave anything “weird”. Well…it was weird for me, but when people asked what strange cravings I was having and I told them “brownies”, they would just look at me like I probably didn’t understand English. I’m not usually much of a chocolate eater. But let me get pregnant and HOO BOY! Forget about hiding your kids and hiding your wife! Hide your brownies! I WILL EAT THEM ALL OM NOM NOM!!!

So anyway.

Ahem.

I am once again craving chocolate. But there’s something else. (And here’s where the “perk” part comes in) I have had days upon days where I just can not think of eating anything other than fried pickles! OMG they’re just so good!

Unfortunately, here in tiny-small-town where I live, there’s only one place to get them and that’s a sports bar (which I generally wouldn’t mind and they used to be a pretty fun place to hang out, but they have gone waaaay downhill in the past year or so). The Hubby and I used to go there a while back and they had this fun little trivia game we played and they had football on the tv’s (mostly the same game on about 14 sets, but they’d change to a different game if you asked) and really great food (FRIED PICKLES!!). Now, they have random broken tv’s, no trivia game (no idea why, each waitress will tell us something different), jacked up prices, and not-so-great food. So, to make a long story a little bit shorter, I”ve been SOL on the fried pickles lately.

But Baby would just not let it go.

So I started Pinteresting! Is that a word? Spell check says it’s not, but I guess it is now! What does dumb ol’ spell check know anyway? (Just for the record, for complete disclosure, I spelled “spell check” wrong just now…)

I tried a few of the recipes and none of them came anywhere NEAR what you’d get at regular old sports bar/restaurant/diner! Lots of them called for soaking the pickles in buttermilk or using cornmeal or good grief….I don’t even know anymore! They just came out…so…wrong!

So what this really long post is about is that I have come up with my own fried pickle recipe that will rock your socks (if you like fried pickles and are wearing socks). And I’m going to make up a batch tonight and try to remember A.) to take pictures and B.) why the heck I walked into the kitchen in the first darn place.

I’ll try to publish it tomorrow since it’s not going to get done for awhile. I made the Pioneer Woman’sChicken Spaghetti casserole last night and kind of wrecked my kitchen and frankly, I was too busy eating to clean up. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s delicious! I didn’t have pimentos, so I used a jalapeno fresh out of my garden that I seeded and scraped and it was FANTASTIC!!

As of yesterday, we’re halfway there, which means that today, I’ve got 139 days left to go! That just so happens to be my favorite number! (not that that has anything to do with anything…or anything…)

And this!

Okay…I’ll stop. I just couldn’t resist!!!

Last night I made this creamy garlic pasta that I found a recipe for on pinterest and it was DELICIOUS!! Even Bill liked it and he’s one of those “has to have some kind of meat in every meal” kinda guys! He said he would definitely like to have it again! Yay for small victories!! I’m blogging from my phone, so I’ll have to lookup and post the link and a picture later because I’m kind of dumb when it comes to technology! :P I suppose you could go to pinterest and search for “creamy garlic pasta” if you really want to try it RIGHT NOW! Which I would not blame you one bit for because it really is that delicious.

Tonight, I’m trying another pinterest recipe! Crockpot chicken teriyaki! I <3 my crockpot even though its kind of falling apart. Both handles have broken off at this point (thanks hubby) but until the crockpot gods smile down on me and send me a sparkly new one, I’ll make do with frankencrockpot! Haha!

**Updated** I had a spare moment, so I thought I’d go ahead and add the links to the creamy garlic pasta (SOGOOD!!!) and the crock pot chicken teriyaki before I forget! Darn you pregnancy-brain!

I stumbled upon a free offer from Prestos Pizza to get the most adorable apron! All you have to do is got to their Facebook page and “Like” them! I thought I’d share this offer with all my cooking buddies and recipe junkies since we obviously all love to be in the kitchen!!

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Hi There!

A little about me…

Hi there! I'm Liz. Welcome to mah blawg! I like to type how I talk, so you'll be seeing a lot of "y'all's" and maybe even a "howdy" or two. I love to cook and bake and stir and chop, but I hate to do dishes so if any of y'all (see what I did there?) love to do dishes but hate to cook and bake and stir and chop, c'mon over! I'm your girl! I'm married to the most wonderful man on earth and am also in possession of the most adorable little boy! Y'all (again? yes I did.) will probably be hearing all about them too! I have a chicken named Nugget and occasionally the "e" key doesn't work on my laptop. Anything else you'd like to know, don't hesitate to holler at me! I love questions! Y'all have a great day!